Animals need to find mates, food, and a
path through the woods, sea, or sky-tasks
that Darwin argued require problem solving.
To find more examples, the scientists read all
the letters from hundreds of people claiming
that their dogs had Rico's talent. In fact, only
two-both border collies-had comparable skills.
One ofthem-the researchers call her Betsy-has
a vocabulary of more than 300 words.
"Even our closest relatives, the great apes,
can't do what Betsy can do-hear a word only
once or twice and know that the acoustic pat
tern stands for something," said Juliane Ka
minski, a cognitive psychologist who worked
with Rico and is now studying Betsy. She and
her colleague Sebastian Tempelmann had come
to Betsy's home in Vienna to give her a fresh
battery of tests. Kaminski petted Betsy, while
Tempelmann set up a video camera.
"Dogs' understanding ofhuman forms of com
munication is something new that has evolved,"
Kaminski said, "something that's developed in
them because of their long association with hu
mans." Although Kaminski has not yet tested
wolves, she doubts they have this language skill.
"Maybe these collies are especially good at it
because they're working dogs and highly moti
vated, and in their traditional herding jobs, they
must listen very closely to their owners."
Scientists think that dogs were domesticated
about 15,000 years ago, a relatively short time in
which to evolve language skills. But how similar
are these skills to those of humans? For abstract
thinking, we employ symbols, letting one thing
stand for another. Kaminski and Tempelmann
were testing whether dogs can do this too.
Betsy's owner-whose pseudonym is Schae
fer-summoned Betsy, who obediently stretched
out at Schaefer's feet, eyes fixed on her face.
Whenever Schaefer spoke, Betsy attentively
cocked her head from side to side.
Kaminski handed Schaefer a stack of color
photographs and asked her to choose one. Each
image depicted a dog's toy against a white back
ground-toys Betsy had never seen before. They
weren't actual toys; they were only images of
toys. Could Betsy connect a two-dimensional
picture to a three-dimensional object?
Schaefer held up a picture of a fuzzy, rainbow
colored Frisbee and urged Betsy to find it. Bet
sy studied the photograph and Schaefer's face,
then ran into the kitchen, where the Frisbee
was placed among three other toys and pho
tographs of each toy. Betsy brought either the
Frisbee or the photograph of the Frisbee to
Schaefer every time.
"It wouldn't have been wrong if she'd just
brought the photograph," Kaminski said. "But
I think Betsy can use a picture, without a name,
to find an object. Still, it will take many more
tests to prove this."
Even then, Kaminski is unsure that other sci
entists will ever accept her discovery because Bet
sy's abstract skill, as minor as it may seem to us,
may tread all too closely to human thinking.
Still, we remain the inventive species. No oth
er animal has built skyscrapers, written sonnets,
or made a computer. Yet animal researchers say
that creativity, like other forms of intelligence,
did not simply spring from nothingness. It, too,
has evolved.
"People were surprised to discover that
chimpanzees make tools," said Alex Kacelnik, a
behavioral ecologist at Oxford University, refer
ring to the straws and sticks chimpanzees shape
to pull termites from their nests. "But people
also thought, 'Well, they share our ancestry-of
ANIMAL MINDS 49